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FreeBSD and Radeon 4350

The revival of my FreeBSD system meant that I was once again confronted with Xorg driver issues. The on-board GeForce 7050 isn’t recognized by the nv(4x) driver, and the proprietary nvidia one is a no-go because I’m running FreeBSD amd64 (and the Linux driver only works on FreeBSD i386). So, time to shop around a little.

This is one of those cases where I wish the Internet would forget sometimes. Wading through the reports of video card compatibility from 2006 just isn’t useful. I had one (I thought) simple question: will an ATI Radeon 4350 work with Xorg 1.6.5 under FreeBSD 8-STABLE?

Perhaps it’s just my search-fu letting me down, but in the end I went and just bought one (as it’s the cheapest video card available in town across the river right now).

And the answer seems to be: yes, the Radeon 4350 is supported under FreeBSD 8-STABLE with Xorg 1.6.5_1,1 and the xf86-video-ati 6.12.4_1 driver. At least I can get twm up and running and exit that same twm and restart X multiple times. As usual it took longest for me to remember which ports to install to get a workable X locally (xorg-minimal + xorg-apps + dbus and hal seems to do the trick).

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on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 16:51 and is filed under Bla Bla.
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I just wanted to let you know that you can run nVidia binary drivers on FreeBSD amd64. There is a beta-driver available for 7.3, 8.0 and 8+STABLE, and it works very nice for me so far, both with a quadro fx 570m and a quadro nvs 3100m.

According to http://wiki.freebsd.org/NouveauPorting the Nouveau driver has been ported already, you could try that one too. But the ATI hardware is the better choice anyway, as you should get fully working 3D too, without any proprietary drivers.

[...] I have a similar setup, with two monitors attached to a Radeon 4350. I’ve written about the 4350 on FreeBSD before. The minor challenge this time around was to get compositing working with a dual-head setup and to [...]